As I grow older and ponder my place in the world, sometimes a thought will come to me that I cannot erase, no matter how hard I try. It will come back to me over and over again. One such thought that I cannot shake is that I live in a society that idolizes the individual. What I mean by this is that we offer up the individual and his perceptions, feelings, desires and experiences as the highest good. American individualism has done many good things, but it seems to have invaded every area of life in an unhealthy way. Suddenly, the individual has become a god unto himself. This new mentality makes it increasingly difficult for one to take a step back and see the world and his place in it with any transcendence. He is mired in whatever his time, his culture and his personal preferences dictate to him. He is trapped within himself. This has been weighing heavily on me recently, so I am beginning a short series of articles dedicating to exposing the shortsightedness of hardcore individualism and offering up alternatives for approaching the world.
I first want to examine the idolization of the individual from the angle of self-expression. Look around at modern American culture, and it becomes clear that self-expression has garnered a near sacred status. Matters of one's right to express whatever is inside him seem to be of the utmost importance to our society. Consider this young boy who made national news because he desperately wanted to wear a My Little Pony backpack to school. His classmates constantly made fun of him because of it, so eventually the principal decided to ask the student's parents not to let him wear the backpack. The national backlash was swift and ferocious. Without taking a side, I mention this incident to illustrate how rabidly the American public defends a complete and absolute right to self-expression.
This attitude has translated into the way society views art. Art, sadly, has more and more often become nothing but a vehicle for channeling inner emotion into something outside of oneself. If your inner feelings become too much to bear, just let them tumble out into a poem or a painting or a song and ... voila! Art. This mentality has infiltrated the education system, particularly as educators and theorists argue that kids will never learn to appreciate or enjoy art unless they are given a chance to express themselves. Guides like this one extol the virtue of self-expression thus: "Language, and literature in particular, are the mirror of our world. It captures and reflects some of the deepest human emotions and the release of these emotions is one our best tools for self-expression." These words are not untrue. Unfortunately, our culture seems to have lost the vision of literature as a mirror of the world; instead, it is seen mainly as a projector of ourselves.
More to the point, this intense focus on self-expression has the unsavory result of erasing any objective standards within art. This art is not better than that art. To say so would be to invalidate the way one student (or any artist, for that matter) expresses themselves. The very concept of molding one's art to a standard outside oneself is an anathema to many. Instead, the only standard for beauty is genuineness. You think I exaggerate? This mindset is implicitly acknowledged by many or most of the education commentators that I referenced before. Consider this anecdote, provided to demonstrate the supposedly self-evident value of self-expression:
"Imagine this: A teacher holds up a photo of a cat, and instructs the class to draw it accurately in 2 minutes. How would the pupils feel?
A group of teacher participants at the Teachers’ Conference 2014 were put through this exercise. They later remarked that they felt restricted because they had to reproduce the cat accurately instead of drawing it in their own ways, pressured because of the time limit and unhappy because they thought their artwork looked 'ugly.'
This exercise showed them how creativity killers can affect children’s self-expression and enjoyment when they are learning art."
The students feel restricted? Oh dear, we had better do all we can to liberate them from the principles of reality and form that govern the world. They think their art is ugly? The solution must be to eradicate the standard by which their art is ugly. Heaven forbid we tell them that it is ugly and teach them how to make it beautiful! Culture, education and society at large have become absolutely obsessed with self-expression, sometimes to the point of lunacy. There must be a better way.
I propose that the way to salvage art from the domination of self-expression is to teach aspiring artists that the world is big and beautiful. Frankly, the world is bigger than you and your feelings. It is bigger than you, and it is so very much bigger than me. This might wound some egos, but it produces beautiful art. People seem to have forgotten that art offers a lens through which to look at the world in all of its bigness and brightness. Sometimes, that means that you are writing about something other than your feelings. Sometimes, you are trying to accurately portray what you see — and that is not wrong.
Of course, it will be argued that this way of thinking stifles emotion. What about love poetry? Will you toss out the Romantics or the young man who writes a poignant song for his lover? Far from it. A key point here that many people do not realize is that feelings do not engender feelings. Things and other people engender feelings. Pure self-expression produces works of art that describe nothing but the artist's emotions. Art that transcends self-expression by itself offers up something beautiful. Would you rather read a poem about love or one about how someone feels about love? Would you rather see a painting that depicts a stunning nature scene or one that abstractly represents the artist's reaction to that scene? Emotions and feelings are reactions. They react to beauty. Art ought to be beautiful by showing us the beauty in the world, whether or not the artist enters into the picture.
Perhaps an illustration from one of history's most influential philosophers would help. Plato described a higher good, a transcendent form of reality which we cannot see in our everyday experience. What we do see in the world — for example, a tree — is only a shadow or a copy of the true form of that tree. Further, a painting of that tree is twice removed from the true form because it is a copy of a copy of the concept of a "tree." He called the true forms "images" and the things we see with our eyes "imitations." The images (the true forms) are truly beautiful while the imitations (the visible world) are less beautiful and the imitations of the imitations (art depicting the visible world) are even less so. I think modernity, however, has taken us to the next level and created a third level of imitation by depicting in art not the image of something beautiful but solely a reaction to that thing. Plato would have us take moments of revelation to make art that takes us as close as possible to the higher good rather than wallowing in our fuzzy perception of that good.
Ultimately, I do not aim to eliminate self-expression altogether. Human beings do have feelings and need to let them out. That is what journals, personal reflections and their counterparts in music and the visual arts are for. I do, however, aim to raise the bar somewhat. Self-expression is not the highest good. It's not the standard of beauty that we strive for. It is a reaction to that beauty. The world is bigger than you, and that is liberating! Life is an opportunity to constantly discover the beauty in the world, and art is a powerful means of doing so.
